26. (Seepage 44) My partner is fond of pointing out that the Beverly Hills Police Department has no doubts about whom the police work for. That's not the case in Los Angeles and many other places. The result is that the police, afraid of prosecution for excessive violence, tend to avoid the violent criminal and concentrate their efforts on enforcing the law among the middle class who don't resist arrest and don't start shooting. That in turn adds to the disaffection of the middle class. It's all part of the problem mentioned in note 24 above.
Heinlein's contempt for political "reformers" knows no bounds. In formal political science courses these people are known as "goo-goo's" (from "good government"); and many a political mess can be traced to their efforts. Heinlein's point is that the only effective reform is constant citizen participation in government. In other words, eternal vigilance is the price ofliberty....
27. (Seepage 45) Note that Heinlein refers to the crisis that left France vulnerable to the Nazi invasion. This book was written before the French defeat in Viet Nam, the Suez Crisis, and the subsequent loss of the French Empire.
28. (Seepage 48) Signs of the times. Today it's April 15th. And the tax laws are far more complex and contradictory than when Heinlein wrote this. The federal government takes in far more money than anyone other than an out and out Socialist would have dreamed possible in 1946; yet it's still broke, and the nation is in such a sea of debt that our grandchildren will not be able to pay it all. We tax capital gains as if they were ordinary income. Anyone want to bet that tax law won't be important 20 years from now?
29. (Seepage 48) In Heinlein's day the Post Office was a courteous and efficient place, not yet the butt of national jokes. Robert was fond of telling stories about that efficiency, including a time when they delivered a package that had been nearly destroyed in a rail accident; attached to the package was a bag of candies which had spilled when the package wrapping tore. Those were the days....
30. (See page 49) TURN THE RASCALS OUT! was long the traditional cry of voters who had had enough. Today the rascals are very thoroughly entrenched.
Heinlein's comments on civil service and patronage are as relevant today as when written, but I doubt he would today have as much faith in written (as opposed to oral) examinations. The problem is the entrenched nature of civil servants and their immunity to political responsibility: for my own part, I think I'd rather see a spoils system for the non-technical work of government.
31. (Seepage 50) How far have we come. Since that was written we have built an enormous welfare bureaucracy which has a heavy financial interest in keeping up the supply of poor people as clients. NASA has become swollen with civil servants appointed on merit but entrenched in a system that produces little but paper. It is needless to multiply examples.
32. (Seepage 51) It's pretty clear that Senator Byrd was right and Heinlein wrong in this instance.
33. (Seepage 51) All that has been changed. Con-gresscritters get enormous perks as well as quite good pay, and have access to other sources of income and perks. State legislators are well paid, and often are full time. The original notion of a legislature was that a group of citizens would go approve laws they then had to live and work under. That got lost, in part due to well meaning "reform" efforts. Heinlein argues that the laborer is worthy of his hire: the evidence is that in politics if you pay the legislator what he is in theory worth he will cease to be a representative, and become a professional politician. What happens is that when the salary is worth competing for, people will compete for the salary. It's possible that what's needed is a legislature made up of one full-time paid professional house and one part-time amateur house. In any event, one can hardly argue that legislators are underpaid today: or that paying them a lot more solved more problems than it raised.
34. (Seepage 51) The public trough used to be slim pickings, but things are very different now. An obvious reform is to go back to what Heinlein describes. Government today dispenses a much larger part of the Gross National Product than when this was written.
35. (See page 51) Nothing has changed here, of course. The lawyers dominate all the legislatures: which may or may not have a bearing on why the laws are always so complex as to require the citizens to hire lawyers in order to obey them.
36. (Seepage 52) Ed Crump used to distinguish between "honest graft" and "dishonest graft." Dishonest graft was stealing from the public; making work that didn't need to be done in order to be paid for it; overcharging for services to the public; that sort of thing. Honest graft was patronage: channeling money that had to be spent to one's friends or associates, or where it would do the most political good, always insisting that the work or services bought be honestly delivered. Although Crump probably wouldn't have cared for Affirmative Action (Memphis was legally segregated during his era), he would almost certainly have included Affirmative Action, Hire the Handicapped, etc., as "honest graft" since those programs involve transfer of public money to people selected by political means.
37. (Seepage 52) I don't know what Heinlein's views on this would be today. My own are that the experiment was tried, and now we need term-limit laws. See above: the problem is that if you pay people a living wage to be politicians, they will make a living as politicians: which removes government from the people and hands it to a political class.
38. (See page 52) The disgust of the public with officeholders is stronger today than when that was written, despite our having made most legislative offices full time and highly paid. See note 37.
39. (Seepage 53) I agree: moreover, I think it was a very good thing that many of our political leaders were mostly motivated by patriotism. In fact, by professionalizing public office we made it more likely that office holding would be merely another job, not a patriotic act. Clearly I am in disagreement with what Heinlein says earlier in this book. I don't know what his views would be today. I doubt he'd have been much impressed by the current group of officeholders; I seem to recall him saying once that the California Legislature was the finest money could buy, but whether this was intended as jest or serious comment I can't say.
40. (Seepage 53) The heart of the matter. Be a party regular. That, however, presumes that the parties matter. Increasingly they don't. The federal structure of the United States has always made life difficult for national political parties. The state parties were fer more important Members of Congress and senators were part of the state party system, generally drawn from the same pool and acting interchangeably with state legislative and executive officers. Periodically the state parties would get together to select a national standard bearer; that was usually as a result of discussion and debate and "power brokering." Today it's far different. The parties have little role in selecting a president; that's done in a series of endurance contests called primaries. Primaries are supposed to be more democratic than a party caucus: this supposes that the ordinary voter, who generally knows no more about a candidate than has been reported in the newspapers and conveyed on TV in 30-second sound bites, will make a more intelligent selection than a party official who may know all the candidates fairly well. It's not a compelling theory, and the results could be imagined if they weren't all too clearly in front of us.
The Founding Fathers of the United States hated political parties, which they called "factions"; but they soon found they couldn't govern without them, and Madison, whose Federalist Papers essays denounce "factionalism" in ringing terms, had no choice but to participate in the building of a party system. For those familiar with the details behind Marbury vs. Madison, the case in which John Marshall asserted the right of the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down acts of Congress as unconstitutional, the irony is delicious: Madison as Secretary of State under Jefferson was acting as a party leader when he failed to deliver the judicial commission demanded by Marbury (who had been appointed by Adams in his outgoing hours).